K-COM (Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children)

Zloth

Community Contributor
Did you enjoy the X-COM and BattleTech style of combat? Did you spend the better part of an hour at the start of Pathfinder: Kingmaker looking through all the classes? If so, you want this game.

First let's get the obvious out of the way: this isn't a triple-A game. The graphics are nice but not remotely mind-blowing. Translation to English is good enough to get the point across but you'll know full well this wasn't translated by a native English speaker. Music isn't particularly impressive, either. But the gameplay.... oh my!

Your game starts out with just one guy: Albus. A pretty standard, bland-as-can-be JRPG main guy. Once you get through a little tutorial as an apprentice and some backstory, you'll start doing some missions. Albus can whack an enemy with is sword, kick off a single target wind spell, or do a tiny area-of-effect attack at the start of the game.

As I said, the battles are similar to X-COM, but they aren't the same. You do still have the "two actions per turn" thing, though, and even some characters (not Albus) that can do the overwatch thing, waiting for an enemy to move before shooting, but this game's combat seems more complex:
  • It isn't your whole side going, then the enemy's whole side going. Each character's time is tracked and a line on the right side of the screen shows who will get the next turn. It's pretty easy to mess around with that line, too. Getting attacked will sometimes get you pushed further back in that line. Doing a large attack will mean your next attack won't come back as soon as doing a smaller attack. So don't go wailing on that wounded grunt when a small attack will finish it.
  • You can get an XP bonus if you "overkill" an enemy. So sometimes you should actually go wailing on that wounded grunt, especially near the end of a battle.
  • Actions also take up vigor. You get some vigor back each turn but, eventually, you'll run out. You can get vigor back by resting for a couple of turns, drinking a vigor potion, or a few other ways.
  • Your spells have a spell bar. This isn't some resource like mana that dwindles down as you use your spells, though. It's actually the opposite! The more you use spells, the more bonuses you get, until eventually (after around 5 spells), the bar maxes out and enables a special spell ability. When you use that power (or after two turns) the spell bar goes back down to 0 again and the special ability disables until next time.
  • Cops! For some reason, the fact that Albus has spent an entire year as an apprentice troubleshooter means he can take over police squads on the scene. These folks aren't as strong as a troubleshooter but they aren't bad and you'll probably get a few of them. In some other missions, you'll get guest troubleshooters.
  • There will be a few little boxes scattered around the mission where you can pick up loot and even equip it right in the mission if it's something you can use.
As you go through the game, you'll level up and eventually get your own apprentice troubleshooter that's more of a mage, and then a martial artist with fire kicks, and then a healer, and so on. Each character has a base class and, after getting to a suitable level, the character can pick a more specialized class. The new class will unlock some new abilities that can be used in battles.

Then there's the masteries. These are another kind of skill but, unlike abilities, you don't activate them in battle. Instead, they are passive things like giving a character to a free melee attack on the first enemy between turns to get within one square. This is where the serious customization comes in because there's over six hundred and fifty of these things as of this writing plus 287 "set masteries" that you can get by slotting certain combinations of masteries. Not every character can slot every mastery - some are for everybody but some are only for certain classes, certain characters, humans, beasts, robots... That's probably a good thing that will keep you from outfitting each character with similar masteries.

Getting masteries is a little strange but it works great in practice. When you defeat an enemy, masteries drop much like loot. When one drops, you not only get a skill that you can slot on somebody, you also learn out to make it from other masteries. So, if you end up with more Body Training masteries than you can use, you can turn one into Acuity to make your crits hit harder or Concentration which makes crits more likely. Or make one of each then combine those two masteries (plus a few others) into a Counterattack mastery, which makes any character with a melee attack automatically hit back when struck.

You can play the game online or off. If you play online, you can see other players in the market and trade with them, plus you can see (if you want) what other players have been choosing in the dialog options that appear. However, the servers do go down for a couple of hours of maintenance every week or two. If you start playing the game online, you can switch to offline but I don't think you can ever go back unless you're willing to lose all your offline progress.

Albus is a bit dull but the next two characters are fun ones. From the previews I've seen of the other characters, most look like they'll have good stories to tell as well. The "Spoonist" enemies have been a delightfully weird cult, too. (Is The Tick behind it all!?)

My biggest beef with the game is that there's only one save. I'm playing online so I'm guessing my save is online, too, so at least I won't lose all my progress if my PC decides to lock up at a bad time {glaring at you, Subnautica!} but there's also no way to save your game then re-load. That means no save-scumming but what really bothers me is that I can't try out things risk-free. Some of these masteries are odd and I would actually like to try them out without worrying about what masteries I have to destroy to get them!

I'm only 30 hours in and don't have nearly all the characters there are in my company yet but the game has already been worth more than the full $25 (USD) price. It's actually a little cheaper than that on Steam until August 10!
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
It's a big one for sure. It took me 30 hours to get to my third troubleshooter and there's more to come. I tend to play my games slow but still...

Oh, I forgot a fun thing I've never seen outside of beta testing - they've given players the ability to help translate the game. I bet that tool has helped a lot, too. There's a few odd things here and there in the dialog but, when I look at the achievement list for this game, ooooh my! "Why this code is here? Using protocol abilities 50 times." Looks to me like the original translation was pretty weak.
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
I wanted to test 2K video uploads so, naturally, I used the game I was playing...


I'm playing an earlier mission and didn't even bump it up with the 'challenging' option so this is a bit of a cake walk. Still, it shows how the battles play out.
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
There's a new DLC coming out for Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children and it's going to be free. The developers are apologizing for it being later than expected. The fans are getting upset because they wanted to pay for it.

Clearly, we're having a lot of difficulties keeping track of who should be reading from what script.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Trying to figure out how the mastery system even works right now. No idea how to equip them, how to craft them or basically do anything.
It might not have opened up yet? There's a button in the office for it:
full

The game goes through a quick tutorial, too.
 
Did my first Violent mission today and I'm a little bit in love with the combat and mastery system now.

Really happy with my team at the moment, lots of masteries to think about and build on like Zloth said.

Still a lot I haven't figured out, not sure on mastery sets, also haven't thought about multi classing and how that could be useful much. Just hit level 20 on Albus and Sion, Irene is 19 and Anne 18.

The Diabloish loot system isnt annoying me as they can do. There's enough of a bump in the level gated weapons that theyre almost always better than lower level stuff, but enough wiggle in the bonuses on similar level items that make it interesting to switcheroo based on different bonuses depending on the character and build.

Good game good game
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Ah, Kaamos_Llama has broken through! Here, wear this spoon....
full

Mastery sets can crank your power up a good bit. RexEvil has a listing of all of them, though it necessarily spoils what characters are coming. You can ignore it and just take what shows up, doing your own experimentation to find them. You can contemplate the whole list, figure out just how you want a particular character's build to be, then grind away to get every mastery needed for those specific mastery sets. Or you can bounce between the two.
 
Yea I'll just go blind first off and put together what I find, I'm not having problems so far playing missions on normal difficulty. Might even try and up it and see how it goes. I think theres no punishment for failing anyway. I like the loop of comparing and switching masteries in and out after each mission, as well as gear of course. Havent looked a lot at crafting either.

Seems theres probably some builds that really break the game, I have Counter attack and Forstallment on Albus and he sometimes takes out several enemies on one turn just passively. Obviously have a lot of armor/Block/Dodge on him as well as damage multipliers for crits, hes pretty brutal! Sion as a Battlemage with a lot of Lightning + masteries and his AOE storm limit break just deletes enemies, made him a bit of a glass cannon.

Fun times!
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
I think theres no punishment for failing anyway. I like the loop of comparing and switching masteries in and out after each mission, as well as gear of course. Havent looked a lot at crafting either.
There's barely any punishment. By the time you've looked at your new loot and masteries, everyone has probably recovered already. If not, just spend a little at the bar and everyone's fine. (Maybe more than fine. You can get food bonuses, too.)

Crafting mostly is a 'later' thing. New stuff comes in so fast at first, it's not worth the time to upgrade for quite a while. Though, have you checked with the stores for quests? They've got a few that are nice to pick up as you go. I missed them and (because I can't possibly skip a quest) had to re-do some missions to get them.

Seems theres probably some builds that really break the game, I have Counter attack and Forstallment on Albus and he sometimes takes out several enemies on one turn just passively.
I did similar! There was some sort of mastery (set?) that made the response attacks all criticals, too. Enemies would swarm him, he'd kill most before they even got next to him and destroy anything that took a swing at him! Then they started using snipers...
 
Havent checked with the stores for quests, didn't know that was a thing so I'll check it out. I figured crafting was that useful yet, I also havent harvested any of the stones or whatever from the wastelands which I think might be critical for that.

Albus is currently set up so that with masteries and gear 60% of the time if shot at he'll either dodge or block, His resistances to physical damage are all close to 300 so that the 40% of time he does get hit it barely seems to tickle him. There was a tutorial that mentioned head shots from certain enemies doing serious damage, and to use smoke grenades to negate the chance of that happening when needed? I'm sure theres surprises to come, I'm only maybe 20 hours in to the current game, so I hope so!
 

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